Using Material from Item B and Elsewhere Assess the Strengths and Limitation of Unstructured Interviews as a Means of Investigating Victims of Crime.

Using material from Item B and elsewhere assess the strengths and limitation of unstructured interviews as a means of investigating victims of crime.

Crime is an occurring situation in all societies which many sociologists have tried to explain, understand the causes and effects. Sociologists generally have a wide range of methods in which they can carry out to discover details or correlations in criminal behaviour in society; a common method used is unstructured interviews. Unstructured interviews are informal conversations between an interviewee and an interviewer where the interviewer has no pre set questions.

Unstructured interviews offer a higher response rate than most other methods such as questionnaires. Questionnaires can easily be binned and ignored but in unstructured interviews the interviewee is expected to offer some sort of response, especially in unstructured interviews where there is no limitations or expected response rate. They also allow rapport to happen which brings the researcher closer to the interviewee and makes valid data more accessible. Another practical advantage of unstructured interviews is the chance to rephrase a question or clear the interviewees misunderstanding to particular question which can affect the answer given to the researcher. Language ties into this idea; literacy of criminals tends to be a lower than average and so interviews are a better idea to get their idea across instead of using a method like questionnaires. Access to criminals is easy as they are usually found in prisons but if the researcher was to study street crime and gangs they would find a lot more difficult to locate, this is also in relation locating victims. Victims are difficult to find without posing any threat to their safety.

There are many practical issues concerning unstructured interviews such as cost. Unstructured interviews are costly because they acquire a skilled and competent interviewer which can perform rapport with the interviewee...